Archive for the ‘security’ Category

Get ready to install a fairly large batch of security patches onto your Windows computers.

As part of its September Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has released a large batch of security updates to patch a total of 81 CVE-listed vulnerabilities, on all supported versions of Windows and other MS products.

The latest security update addresses 27 critical and 54 important vulnerabilities in severity, of which 38 vulnerabilities are impacting Windows, 39 could lead to Remote Code Execution (RCE).

Microsoft says the flaw could allow an attacker to take control of an affected system, install programs, view, change, or delete data by tricking victims into opening a specially crafted document or application sent over an email.

The flaw could even allow an attacker to create new accounts with full user rights. Therefore users with fewer user rights on the system are less impacted than users who operate with admin rights.

According to FireEye, this zero-day flaw has actively been exploited by a well-funded cyber espionage group to deliver FinFisher Spyware (FinSpy) to a Russian-speaking “entity” via malicious Microsoft Office RTF files in July this year.

FinSpy is a highly secret surveillance software that has previously been associated with British company Gamma Group, a company that legally sells surveillance and espionage software to government agencies.

Once infected, FinSpy can perform a large number of secret tasks on victims computer, including secretly monitoring computers by turning ON webcams, recording everything the user types with a keylogger, intercepting Skype calls, copying files, and much more.

“The [new variant of FINSPY]…leverages heavily obfuscated code that employs a built-in virtual machine – among other anti-analysis techniques – to make reversing more difficult,” researchers at FireEye said.

“As likely another unique anti-analysis technique, it parses its own full path and searches for the string representation of its own MD5 hash. Many resources, such as analysis tools and sandboxes, rename files/samples to their MD5 hash in order to ensure unique filenames.”

Three Publicly Disclosed Vulnerabilities

The remaining three publicly known vulnerabilities affecting the Windows 10 platform include:

Broadcom BCM43xx Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2017-9417): this flaw exists in the Broadcom chipset in HoloLens, which could be exploited by attackers to send a specially crafted WiFi packet, enabling them to install programs, view, change, or delete data, even create new accounts with full admin rights.

BlueBorne Attack: Another Reason to Install Patches Immediately

Also, the recently disclosed Bluetooth vulnerabilities known as “BlueBorne” (that affected more than 5 Million Bluetooth-enabled devices, including Windows, was silently patched by Microsoft in July, but details of this flaw have only been released now.

BlueBorne is a series of flaws in the implementation of Bluetooth that could allow attackers to take over Bluetooth-enabled devices, spread malware completely, or even establish a “man-in-the-middle” connection to gain access to devices’ critical data and networks without requiring any victim interaction.

So, users have another important reason to apply September security patches as soon as possible in order to keep hackers and cyber criminals away from taking control over their computers.

Other flaws patched this month include five information disclosure and one denial of service flaws in Windows Hyper-V, two cross-site scripting (XSS) flaws in SharePoint, as well as four memory corruption and two remote code execution vulnerabilities in MS Office.

For installing security updates, simply head on to Settings → Update & security → Windows Update → Check for updates, or you can install the updates manually.

Almost half a million people in the United States are highly recommended to get their pacemakers updated, as they are vulnerable to hacking.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has recalled 465,000 pacemakers after discovering security flaws that could allow hackers to reprogram the devices to run the batteries down or even modify the patient’s heartbeat, potentially putting half a million patients lives at risk.

A pacemaker is a small electrical battery-operated device that’s surgically implanted in the chest of patients to help control their heartbeats. The device uses low-energy electrical pulses to stimulate the heart to beat at a normal rate.

Six types of pacemakers, all manufactured by health-tech firm Abbott (formerly of St. Jude Medical) are affected by the recall, which includes the Accent, Anthem, Accent MRI, Accent ST, Assurity, and Allure.

All the affected models are radio-frequency enabled cardiac devices—typically fitted to patients with irregular heartbeats and patients recovering from heart failure—and were manufactured before August 28th.

In May, researchers from security firm White Scope also analysed seven pacemaker products from four different vendors and discovered that pacemaker programmers could intercept the device using “commercially available” equipment that cost between $15 to $3,000.

“Many medical devices—including St. Jude Medical’s implantable cardiac pacemakers—contain configurable embedded computer systems that can be vulnerable to cybersecurity intrusions and exploits,” the FDA said in a security advisory.

“As medical devices become increasingly interconnected via the Internet, hospital networks, other medical devices, and smartphones, there is an increased risk of exploitation of cybersecurity vulnerabilities, some of which could affect how a medical device operates.”

To protect against these critical vulnerabilities, the pacemakers must be given a firmware update. The good news is that those affected by the recall do not require to have their pacemakers removed and replaced.

Instead, patients with these implanted, vulnerable device must visit their healthcare provider to receive a firmware update—something that would take just 3 minutes or so to complete—that can fix the vulnerabilities.

As a result of the firmware update, any external device trying to communicate with the pacemaker will require authorization.

Moreover, the software update also introduces data encryption, operating system fixes, the ability to disable network connectivity features, according to Abbott’s press release published on Tuesday, August 29.

Any pacemaker device manufactured beginning August 28, 2017, will have the firmware update pre-installed and will not need the update.

The FDA recall of devices does not apply to implantable cardiac defibrillators (ICDs) and cardiac resynchronization ICDs.

Abbott is working with the FDA, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), global regulators, and leading independent security experts, in efforts to “strengthen protections against unauthorized access to its devices.”

Although there are no reports of compromised pacemakers yet, the threat is enough to potentially harm heart patients with an implanted pacemaker that could even put their lives at great risk.

This time sensitive and personal data of millions of transporters in Sweden, along with the nation’s military secrets, have been exposed, putting every individual’s as well as national security at risk.

Who exposed the sensitive data? The Swedish government itself.

Swedish media is reporting of a massive data breach in the Swedish Transport Agency (Transportstyrelsen) after the agency mishandled an outsourcing deal with IBM, which led to the leak of the private data about every vehicle in the country, including those used by both police and military.

The data breach exposed the names, photos and home addresses of millions of Swedish citizen, including fighter pilots of Swedish air force, members of the military’s most secretive units, police suspects, people under the witness relocation programme, the weight capacity of all roads and bridges, and much more.

The incident is believed to be one of the worst government information security disasters ever.

Here’s what and How it Happened:

In 2015, the Swedish Transport Agency hand over IBM an IT maintenance contract to manage its databases and networks.

However, the Swedish Transport Agency uploaded IBM’s entire database onto cloud servers, which covered details on every vehicle in the country, including police and military registrations, and individuals on witness protection programs.

The transport agency then emailed the entire database in messages to marketers that subscribe to it.

And what’s terrible is that the messages were sent in clear text.

When the error was discovered, the transport agency merely thought of sending a new list in another email, asking the subscribers to delete the old list themselves.

If you think the scandal ends there, you are wrong. The outsourcing deal gave IBM staff outside Sweden access to the Swedish transport agency’s systems without undergoing proper security clearance checks.

IBM administrators in the Czech Republic were also given full access to all data and logs, according to Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter (DN), which analysed the Säpo investigation documents.

According to Pirate Party founder and now head of privacy at VPN provider Private Internet Access Rick Falkvinge, who broughtdetails of this scandal, the incident “exposed and leaked every conceivable top secret database: fighter pilots, SEAL team operators, police suspects, people under witness relocation.”

Tons of Sensitive Info Exposed about Both Individuals and Nation’s Critical Infrastructures

According to Falkvinge, the leak exposed:

The weight capacity of all roads as well as bridges (which is crucial for warfare, and gives a lot idea about what roads are intended to be used as wartime airfields).

Names, photos, and home addresses of fighter pilots in the Air Force.

Names, photos, and home addresses of everybody in a police register, which are believed to be classified.

Names, photos, and residential addresses of all operators in the military’s most secret units that are equivalent to the SAS or SEAL teams.

Names, photos, and addresses of everybody in a witness relocation program, who has been given protected identity for some reasons.

Type, model, weight, and any defects in all government and military vehicles, including their operator, which reveals a much about the structure of military support units.

Although the data breach happened in 2015, Swedish Secret Service discovered it in 2016 and started investigating the incident, which led to the fire of STA director-general Maria Ågren in January 2017.

Ågren was also fined half a month’s pay (70,000 Swedish krona which equals to $8,500) after finding her guilty of being “careless with secret information,” according to the publication.

What’s the worrying part? The leaked database may not be secured until the fall, said the agency’s new director-general Jonas Bjelfvenstam. The investigation into the scope of the leak is still ongoing.

If you don’t know our “404” project[1], I would definitively recommend having a look at it! The idea is to track HTTP 404 errors returned by your web servers. I like to compare the value of 404 errors found in web sites log files to “dropped” events in firewall logs. They can have a huge value to detect ongoing attacks or attackers performing some reconnaissance. Reviewing 404 errors is one task from my daily hunting-todo-list but it may quickly become unmanageable if you have a lot of websites or popular ones. The idea is to focus on “rare” events that could usually pass below the radar. Here is a Splunk query that I’m using in a daily report:

Many tested files are basically backup files like I already mentioned in a previous diary[2], nothing changed. But yesterday, I found a bot searching for even more interesting files: configuration files from popular tools and website private keys. Indeed, file transfer tools are used by many webmasters to deploy files on web servers and they could theoretically leave juicy data amongst the HTML files. Here is a short list of what I detected:

Each file was searched with a different combination of lower/upper case characters. Note the presence of ‘rules.abe’ that is used by webmasters to specify specific rules for some web applications[3]. This file could contain references to hidden applications (This is interesting to know for an attacker).

Security researchers have discovered a critical remotely exploitable vulnerability in an open-source software development library used by major manufacturers of the Internet-of-Thing devices that eventually left millions of devices vulnerable to hacking.

Dubbed “Devil’s Ivy,” the stack buffer overflow vulnerability allows a remote attacker to crash the SOAP WebServices daemon and could be exploited to execute arbitrary code on the vulnerable devices.

The Devil’s Ivy vulnerability was discovered by researchers while analysing an Internet-connected security camera manufactured by Axis Communications.

“When exploited, it allows an attacker to remotely access a video feed or deny the owner access to the feed,” researchers say.

“Since these cameras are meant to secure something, like a bank lobby, this could lead to collection of sensitive information or prevent a crime from being observed or recorded.”

Axis confirmed the vulnerability that exists in almost all of its 250 camera models (you can find the complete list of affected camera models here) and has quickly released patched firmware updates on July 6th to address the vulnerability, prompting partners and customers to upgrade as soon as possible.

However, researchers believe that their exploit would work on internet-connected devices from other vendors as well, as the affected software is used by Canon, Siemens, Cisco, Hitachi, and many others.

Axis immediately informed Genivia, the company that maintains gSOAP, about the vulnerability and Genivia released a patch on June 21, 2017.

The company also reached out to electronics industry consortium ONVIF to ensure all of its members, including Canon, Cisco, and Siemens, those who make use of gSOAP become aware of the issue and can develop patches to fix the security hole.

Internet of Things (IoT) devices has always been the weakest link and, therefore, an easy entry for hackers to get into secured networks. So it is always advisable to keep your Internet-connected devices updated and away from the public Internet.

A highly critical vulnerability has been discovered in the Cisco Systems’ WebEx browser extension for Chrome and Firefox, for the second time in this year, which could allow attackers to remotely execute malicious code on a victim’s computer.

Cisco WebEx is a popular communication tool for online events, including meetings, webinars and video conferences that help users connect and collaborate with colleagues around the world. The extension has roughly 20 million active users.Discovered by Tavis Ormandy of Google Project Zero and Cris Neckar of Divergent Security, the remote code execution flaw (CVE-2017-6753) is due to a designing defect in the WebEx browser extension. To exploit the vulnerability, all an attacker need to do is trick victims into visiting a web page containing specially crafted malicious code through the browser with affected extension installed. Successful exploitation of this vulnerability could result in the attacker executing arbitrary code with the privileges of the affected browser and gaining control of the affected system.

“I see several problems with the way sanitization works, and have produced a remote code execution exploit to demonstrate them,” Ormandy said. “This extension has over 20M [million] active Chrome users alone, FireFox and other browsers are likely to be affected as well.”Cisco has already patched the vulnerability and released “Cisco WebEx Extension 1.0.12” update for Chrome and Firefox browsers that address this issue, though “there are no workarounds that address this vulnerability.”

Download Cisco WebEx Extension 1.0.12

In general, users are always recommended to run all software as a non-privileged user in an effort to diminish the effects of a successful attack.

Fortunately, Apple’s Safari, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Microsoft’s Edge are not affected by this vulnerability. Cisco WebEx Productivity Tools, Cisco WebEx browser extensions for Mac or Linux, and Cisco WebEx on Microsoft Edge or Internet Explorer are not affected by the vulnerability, the company confirmed.The remote code execution vulnerability in Cisco WebEx extension has been discovered second time in this year.

Security researchers have discovered a new method to decrypt satellite phone communications encrypted with the GMR-2 cipher in “real time” — that too in mere fractions of a second in some cases.

The new attack method has been discovered by two Chinese security researchers and is based on previous research by German academicians in 2012, showing that the phone’s encryption can be cracked so quickly that attackers can listen in on calls in real time.

The research, disclosed in a paper published last week by the security researchers in the International Association for Cryptologic Research, focused on the GMR-2 encryption algorithm that is commonly being used in most modern satellite phones, including British satellite telecom Inmarsat, to encrypt voice calls in order to prevent eavesdropping.

Unlike previous 2012 research by German researchers who tried to recover the encryption key with the help of ‘plaintext’ attacks, the Chinese researchers attempted to “reverse the encryption procedure to deduce the encryption-key from the output keystream directly.”

The attack method requires hitting a 3.3GHz satellite stream thousands of times with an inversion attack, which eventually produces the 64-bit encryption key and makes it easier to hunt for the decryption key, allowing attackers to decrypt communications and listen in to a conversation.

“This indicates that the inversion attack is very efficient and practical which could lead to a real time crack on the GMR-2 cipher,” the research paper reads. “The experimental results on a 3.3GHz platform demonstrate that the 64-bit encryption-key can be completely retrieved in around 0.02s.”

According to the duo, the attack can eventually crack the satellite phone call encryption in a fraction of a second when carried out successfully, allowing the attacker to break into the communications in real time for live eavesdropping.

The new findings spark concerns surrounding the security of satellite phones, which are mostly used by field officers in war zones that protect our land, air, and water, as well as people in remote area precisely because of no other alternatives.

Such attacks could pose a significant threat to satellite phone users’ privacy.

“Given that the confidentiality is a very crucial aspect in satellite communications, the encryption algorithms in the satellite phones should be strong enough to withstand various eavesdropping risks,” researchers said.

“This again demonstrates that there exists serious security flaws in the GMR-2 cipher, and it is crucial for service providers to upgrade the cryptographic modules of the system in order to provide confidential communication,” researchers concluded.

The research was carried out by Jiao Hu, Ruilin Li and Chaojing Tang of National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, China. For more details, you can head on to their research paper [PDF], titled “A Real-time Inversion Attack on the GMR-2 Cipher Used in the Satellite Phones.”

As part of this month’s Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has released security patches for a serious privilege escalation vulnerability which affect all versions of its Windows operating system for enterprises released since 2007.

Researchers at behavioral firewall specialist Preempt discovered two zero-day vulnerabilities in Windows NTLM security protocols, both of which allow attackers to create a new domain administrator account and get control of the entire domain.

NT LAN Manager (NTLM) is an old authentication protocol used on networks that include systems running the Windows operating system and stand-alone systems.

Although NTLM was replaced by Kerberos in Windows 2000 that adds greater security to systems on a network, NTLM is still supported by Microsoft and continues to be used widely.

LDAP fails to adequately protect against NTLM relay attacks, even when it has built-in LDAP signing the defensive measure, which only protects from man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks and not from credential forwarding at all.

The vulnerability could allow an attacker with SYSTEM privileges on a target system to use incoming NTLM sessions and perform the LDAP operations, like updating domain objects, on behalf of the NTLM user.

“To realize how severe this issue is, we need to realize all Windows protocols use the Windows Authentication API (SSPI) which allows downgrade of an authentication session to NTLM,” Yaron Zinar from Preempt said in a blog post, detailing the vulnerability.

“As a result, every connection to an infected machine (SMB, WMI, SQL, HTTP) with a domain admin would result in the attacker creating a domain admin account and getting full control over the attacked network.”

According to Preempt researchers, RDP Restricted-Admin allows authentication systems to downgrade to NTLM. This means the attacks performed with NTLM, such as credential relaying and password cracking, could also be carried out against RDP Restricted-Admin.

When combined with the LDAP relay vulnerability, an attacker could create a fake domain admin account whenever an admin connects with RDP Restricted-Admin and get control of the entire domain.

The researchers discovered and privately reported LDAP and RDP Relay vulnerabilities in NTLM to Microsoft in April.

However, Microsoft acknowledged the NTLM LDAP vulnerability in May, assigning it CVE-2017-8563, but dismissed the RDP bug, claiming it is a “known issue” and recommending configuring a network to be safe from any NTLM relay.

“In a remote attack scenario, an attacker could exploit this vulnerability by running a specially crafted application to send malicious traffic to a domain controller. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could run processes in an elevated context,” Microsoft explained in its advisory.

“The update addresses this vulnerability by incorporating enhancements to authentication protocols designed to mitigate authentication attacks. It revolves around the concept of channel binding information.”

So, sysadmins are recommended to patch their vulnerable servers with NT LAN Manager enabled as soon as possible.

You can either consider turning NT LAN Manager off or require that incoming LDAP and SMB packets are digitally signed in order to prevent credential relay attacks.

Besides this NTLM relay flaw, Microsoft has released patches for 55 security vulnerabilities, which includes 19 critical, in several of its products, including Edge, Internet Explorer, Windows, Office and Office Services and Web Apps, .NET Framework, and Exchange Server.

Windows users are strongly advised to install the latest updates as soon as possible in order to protect themselves against the active attacks in the wild.

Another piece of old, insecure web infrastructure is about to be killed off.

Oracle says that it’s discontinuing its Java browser plugin starting with the next big release of the programming language. No, Oracle isn’t killing the Java programming language itself, which is still widely used by many companies. Nor is it killing off JavaScript, which is a completely different language that Oracle doesn’t control. What Oracle is getting rid of is a plugin that allows you to run programs known as “Java applets” in your browser.You may not think you even have the Java plugin installed, but if you’ve ever installed Java, or if Java came pre-installed on your computer, then you probably do, even if you never use it. The good news is that Oracle won’t be automatically installing the Java plugin when you install Java anymore. The bad news is that it won’t be providing security updates anymore either, so you should go ahead and uninstall it now. In fact, there’s a good chance you can uninstall Java entirely.

So the Juniper Netscreen/SSG ScreenOS password hash is a bit of a hidden mystery. I had in my hand the config of a Netscreen device and I wanted to perform a reverse of the password hashes to see if they were weak.

John The ripper has supported Netscreen passwords since back in 2008 when Samuel Moñux released this patch. Unfortunately John was too slow for my needs as I was up against a deadline, thus I looked at the faster approach of using the GPU to perform the cracking. Hashcat is the best tool for the job but unfortunately Hashcat didn’t support this hashing algorithm.

After a looking through jar source code I found this python script which can generate a Netscreen hash, getting warmer. Here’s a shortened version of the code to show just the function we’re interested in:

After looking through the code it is clear that there is a fixed salt of Administration Tools and a salt of the username(lines 2 and 3).
The code then takes each 2 chars and adds the binaries together(lines 8-11)
From this it creates 3 characters from the 16bits(lines 14-18)
And finally is scatters the letters n,r,c,s,t & n onto the hash in specific places (lines 20 and 21)
It’s worth noting that the letters nrcstn is actually NeTSCReeN in reverse without the e’s

Using this code it was possible to write some new code to reverse backwards through the steps in order to go from a Netscreen hash back to the raw MD5 hash. Here’s the function for this:

Now using the power of GPU cracking and my favourite tool Hashcat it is possible to crack the hash. We need to put the hash in a format that hashcat can understand so we create a file called netscreen.txt and put the hash in the following format(note the training colon after the fixed salt):

As this algorithm uses more than just a fixed salt to create the hash I’ll speak to Atom (the creator of hashcat) to see if he want’s to implement it into a future release, but until then this code should help you in cracking netscreen passwords.